Baroness Keeley
Main Page: Baroness Keeley (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Keeley's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(12 years ago)
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Andy Burnham
They are certainly sheepish today; they need to get back to their offices pretty sharpish to amend their websites in light of the letter from the chair of the UK Statistics Authority.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
The website of the Conservatives in Salford says, on the budget that was going to increase,
“we would see more investment in our local NHS”
under a Conservative Government, but in Salford Royal hospital, 750 jobs have been cut. Between them, all our local hospitals have had 3,100 jobs cut in the past couple of years, and two walk-in centres have closed. If the budget is the same, why all these cuts?
Andy Burnham
This is the reality on the ground, as my hon. Friend says. There is also the mental health budget cut. There has been a mismatch; people see all those things, yet they hear the statements from the Government, and it does not make any sense, but now the truth and the facts about our NHS are being told, and things will begin to make sense to people.
What I find most troubling about all this, and most revealing about the Government’s style and the way that they work, is that even when they are warned by an official watchdog, they just carry on—as they are doing today—as if nothing had happened. When they admitted cutting the NHS in 2011-12 by amending their website, what was the excuse that they offered to Sir Andrew? Labour left plans for a cut; that is what the Prime Minister said at the Dispatch Box last week. It is what the Secretary of State said in a letter replying to Mr Dilnot. Again, that is simply untrue.
According to Treasury statistics, Labour left plans for a 0.7% real-terms increase in the NHS in 2011-12. From then on, we had a spending settlement giving real-terms protection to the NHS budget. It was this Government who slowed spending in 2010-11, who allowed the resulting £1.9 billion underspend to be swiped back by the Treasury, contrary to the Secretary of State’s promise that all savings would be reinvested, and who still have published plans, issued by Her Majesty’s Treasury, for a further 0.3% cut to the NHS in 2013-14 and 2014-15, contrary to the new statement that the Conservatives have just put on their website. The Secretary of State has a lot of explaining to do.